Why Becoming An Early Riser Will Change Your Life

When I was a soldier I didn’t sleep for 5 nights and 6 days in a row. That was one of the most traumatic and, at the same time, transforming experiences I ever had. I’m not going to talk about the specific context of this event, you can go read a small recap of what happened in this article. Today, I’m going to talk about sleep, and how sleep is influencing our lives.

I remember that during those nights without sleep, my consciousness started to shift away at certain intervals, without my control. I don’t think that those were hallucinations, but somehow, I started to see things that doesn’t really existed. Those episodes may have been triggered by the extreme pressure too, but I think the loss of sleep had also a considerable impact.

After those 5 nights, I slept only one night and felt back in shape immediately. All the turmoil that generated that situation ended in a few weeks, and I thought I was back to normal for good. But I wasn’t. Somehow, my sleeping routine has been irreversibly modified. I started to have 24-48 hours periods without sleep at almost no energy cost. Didn’t feel any fatigue whatsoever, the only downside of those episodes being that my body started to heat more than usual. I was literally warmer after those 24-48 hours without sleep.

Sleep Patterns And Travel

20 years later, I started to travel a lot. Introducing jetlag, if you know what I mean. I visited 4 continents and started to do business on 2. During those trips, my sleep patterns were completely messed up. Let me tell you why and how.

During my first trip to New Zealand, I arrived in Auckland at 10 AM, after 25 hours spent in 3 airplanes. The total trip time was around 30 hours. Knowing that I am pretty good at those 24-48 hours without sleep, I didn’t pay any specific attention to my body signals, just went on without worrying too much.

After 2 hours of visiting Auckland (I was with some friends) I felt an incredible powerful sensation of cold. There were 25 Celsius degrees outside, so it must have been something from the inside. Almost already asleep I asked my friend to take me somewhere where I can take a nap. After 3-4 hours of sleep, I felt energized and warm again.

I don’t know the explanation for the warmness I experienced after the 24-48 hours sleepless episodes, not for the sudden cold I experienced during my first jetlag incident. All I know is that sleep plays in incredible role in our lives, and we should not take it for granted.

For A Sleep Discipline

So, 20 years after my first major sleep disruption experience and 1 year after my first serious jetlag experience, I finally came up with some conclusions regarding sleep and its importance in our life.

First of all, sleep is not something that just happens. It’s a very important part of our life. Just because we’re not conscious during sleep it doesn’t mean we cannot control its quality and effectiveness.

Second, sleep is responsible with a lot of stuff that happens within our bodies, and every deviation from the normal course can have totally unpredictable effects. See the warmness and coldness I experienced without any specific reasons.

And third. sleep is a powerful and effective tool for enhancing our conscious life. Whenever your sleep patterns are neat, your energy levels are high. So, not only we can control sleep in itself, but by controlling sleep, we can control the awake part as well.

And this is how I came up with what I call a sleep discipline. A way to control sleep and enhance my daily routines. I did many sleep experiences during my life, most of them not yet described on my blog. For instance, when I was a student, I completely reversed my life cycle for 3 weeks, sleeping during the day and writing during the night so I can finish a novel I was writing at that time.

But from all these experiments, all this pushing and learning, only one thing came up really strong. Waking up early seemed to be the most effective sleep routine of all.

Benefits Of Waking Up Early

Why? Let me give you some of the benefits of this.

1. Social Advantage

We’re social animals and a lot of our life is unfolding in groups. These groups have routines and rules. For instance, work starts at 9 AM, this is a widely accepted social routine (I know some work doesn’t start at 9 AM but for the vast majority of the population, this is the case). So, waking up early will give you an enormous advantage in front of your colleagues. You will have a few hours for yourself just before the whole group will start to move.

2. Diurnal / Nocturnal Pattern

If you’re waking up early, when there’s still dark outside, something subtle will happen. You will always witness the nocturnal / diurnal melting. I’m not talking only about witnessing the sunrise, which is in itself a very powerful experience, but about witnessing this transformation of darkness into light. Even if you don’t realize it consciously, being a constant witness of this transformation will give you much more confidence.

3. Broaden Day Vision

Every time you wake up early, you put some distance between your “normal” day and yourself. It’s like taking two steps back and observing what’s to unfold before you before the actual unfolding process starts. This gives what I call a broaden day vision. Which in time will become just a broaden vision of stuff, period. If you wake up just before your day starts, you’ll feel a little bit trapped, if not more. It’s like you don’t “have” time.

4. Implementing New Habits

The first part of the day is the most suitable for implementing new habits. During that part of the day you’re much more aware and available, because your normal routine didn’t kick in. Yet. So, if you can “enlarge” this period, by waking up earlier than what what’s usually the norm, you will give yourself more time for new stuff. The effect will be, in time, overwhelming. Those tiny habits implemented during those solitary mornings will pay off big time.

5. More Choices

I don’t know about you, but I really like to have more choices in life. Doesn’t matter the exact situation, I just don’t like to be put in front of a situation with only one answer. I want to have many choices. Waking up just before your work day will start will drastically limit your choices. The only reasonable choice would be to shower, eat and go to work. Well, waking up early will give you so many new possibilities to start your day.

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Now, these are only the visible part of the iceberg, things that you can see and experience in the moment. But the most important, long lasting and powerful effect of waking up early is that you will grow an eye for the opportunities. You will learn how to wake up on something just before anybody else does. Being it a career opportunity, a new relationship opportunity or just something that nobody sees yet. You will be trained to spot that subtle movement which will lead to something extraordinary. Yes, you will.

How To Become An Advanced Early Riser

I’m going to finish this article in a slightly different way than I usually do. I won’t draw any conclusion and I won’t try to find an inspiring and motivating punch line. Nope. This time I will be very practical. Since you’ve been already convinced of all the benefits of becoming an early riser, it’s time for you to start doing it. Like right now.

I’m not going to teach you how to do it. Not this time. Because there is somebody else who will do a much better job at this than I could ever do. His name is Steven Aitchison and he’s one of my close blogging friends. He’s going to teach you how to do it because he just launched the best guide for waking up early I ever seen.

No, this is not a joke and I’m not pushing it. I call this type of situations “synchronicities”. He just launched the best guide for becoming an early riser available now. Being a close friend of Steven I had a chance to look at the product for a few days before the official launch. I even had the courage to make a few suggestions and Steven has been kindly enough to implement them. Go figure…

Now, I said we should get practical? Yeap, let’s do it! What you’ll find in this guide anyway? You’ll find 18 practical modules for implementing an advanced early rising routine (or AER, this is how Steven is calling it) and a few extra goodies. One of them is called “Ditch The Alarm Clock and Wake Up Naturally” which is in itself a step by step guide on how to tune in your body to a new sleeping routing, without an alarm clock.

It’s not an ebook and it’s not a course. It’s both of them in one package and more. It’s a guide and a guide means a much more close and attentive approach. It’s solid material. Steven has also packed a few guided meditation in this package, just to make me envious, I think. Did I said, this is one of the best guides? Oh, yes, I said it.

Now, for the good part: this whole package is only 25$. Like in twenty five dollars, not a cent more. Now here comes the one hundred points question: how much are you really ready to spend in order to win 3 hours of life everyday? I know this is an important question and you don’t have to answer to me right now. Instead, go visit Steve guide here: How To Become An Advanced Early Riser and thank me later.

For your information, this is an affiliate link, which means I am getting a commission for each sale. And I am happy to get one, to be honest, because… oh, darn, I think I’m going to say that for the fourth time in one paragraph: because this is the best guide for waking up early I ever seen. Now, I said it.

Waking Up Early

Waking up early is probably the most popular topic amongst the personal development blogs. Not to mention the fact that is almost the first thing you hear during a personal development seminar: I will teach you how to wake up early, my friend. It’s the “Hello World” of the personal development (“Hello World” is the first application you build when you learn a new programming language). I have to admit that I was quite busy with this too, back in my early personal development endeavors.

So, why is this so important after all? Why waking up early? In today’s post I’d like to focus on the reasons behind this popular topic as well as on some of my own techniques to accomplish this.

No Time Mindset

With all due respect, I think that waking up early comes from a “I have no free time” mindset. Waking up early is for people who have daily jobs but want to win extra time on the side. Waking up early is a signal you send to yourself with the content: “free some of my limited, allotted time, and do it early in the morning”.

That approach changes your time perception. It makes time a finite resource. We may perceive time as a finite resource, but that’s only a convention. You know, when you’re in love, a second can seem like minutes and an hour can last days. When you’re bored, a whole day may pass in a second. We manipulate time through our perceptions. If we perceive time as infinite it will be infinite, the same as it is when we’re in love.

The empty goal of waking up early changes our time perception into a limited resource.

So, waking up early as a goal comes from a scarcity mindset. The underlying reason is: “I am in serious trouble with my time, I don’t have enough, I have to win some otherwise I won’t be well”. Lack of something is a powerful motivator and this motivator works for many of us. Especially when you can have some quick and visible victories. If you can create a habit of waking up early in a week, you’ll have some quick victories on your side and that will make some boost in your self-respect. You get the feeling you are not missing that thing anymore.

But the main question is: “what are you going to do with all that free time?”. I know people who were really good at creating the habit of getting up early but they reverted back to a different routine after several weeks, because… well, because they had no idea what to do with that free time.

So, if we’re going to wake up early, we need a better reason for that. We need to know what are we going to do with that free time, otherwise it won’t work. Or at least, it didn’t work for me. Waking up early must be a consequence of something much bigger than a habit, it shouldn’t be just a goal on itself.

Assess Your Time

What are you doing with your time throughout the day? Have you ever had the curiosity to write it down, to journal your time usage? I bet you’ll have some big surprises. It might sound awkward to journal every 15 minutes what are you up to, but if you can do it for just one day long, it will be enlightening. You’ll be dazzled to find out that your daily time is huge, you’re just not using it properly.

But, suppose you’re using it properly, but need more. If you haven’t notice it so far, I am using my Assess, Decide, Do life management framework for this. If you haven’t read yet the ADD series, feel free to do it right now and then come back here to read this post. By using this ADD approach, we’re going to traverse each of the necessary realms (from assessment to doing) until we’re actually going to implement the habit.

So, for now we’ll be starting in our Assess realm. Suppose we really have to do more (out of pleasure, for instance: we started a nice project, we love it, and want to do more of what we like). We gathered all the information we need.

Here comes the decision realm. We can decide to free up some time throughout the day, by eliminating some other tasks, for instance, or we may chose to free up some time from our sleeping routine. Again, suppose we’re not going to free time from the early night (which will result in going to sleep later than usual) and we decide to free up from the morning routine.

As you may see, this approach is really different from other DIY tutorials or self-improvement programs. We take a step back and first we assess the need for that specific habit. And then, after we have all the information from the assessment realm, we make a decision. And again, note that the decision could be quite different from our initial intention: we may find out that we’ll be better going to sleep later than waking up early.

Now that we assessed the need, took the decision, all we have to do is implement the doing part.

Waking Up Early – How To

In my experience, there are two ways to achieve this: brute force and gradual adaptation.

Brute Force

Back in time 20 years, for a personal story. At that time I was doing my military service in a Romanian city called Timisoara. We were still under a communist regime and military service was pretty bad. But out of nothing, during December, some people in Timisoara started a Revolution which ultimately led to the fall of the communist regime. Years after, that was to be called the Romanian Revolution. I didn’t have any idea what was going on in the city, but the most important result for me, as a soldier, was that I was forced not to sleep for 5 nights and 6 days.

That’s what I call brute force. From that event on I was able to manipulate my sleeping patterns much more easily. The duration of that sleep deprivation was so huge that made 2 nights of sleep deprivation in a row actually manageable. Of course, I was under extremely stressful conditions. But the main result was that I knew I was able to do it. Ever since I find it really comfortable to have 24-36 hours in a row without sleep, every once in a while.

Word of caution: I do not recommend to try sleep deprivation like this, it was just an example on how bigger and faster moves can make regular moves achievable. It was also something that took place in very stressful conditions and also generated very stressful effects, apart from this new ability. Sleep deprivation can be extremely dangerous for your health, and it is something you should know before starting a waking up early routine.

Another example for brute force is running: if you manage to run one day 10 miles, you’ll find the next day quite comfortable to run 3 miles, although your regular habit is to run only 1 mile.

I was applying this technique in my guest posting habits also. I never had a guest post in my entire life, but that was until last month, when I decided it’s time to start doing this. And last month I implemented an experiment called “Massive Guest Posting” (feel free to read the post for more info) during which I wrote and published not one, not two, not three, but seven guest posts. To make things a little bit spicier, each post was part of a series, was published on a different blog in a different city on the globe, but at the exact same time.

Guess what, now I’m finding pretty comfortable to write 2 guest posts per month, and that without affecting my regular writing routine for the blogs I already own.

Gradual Adaptation

Gradual adaptation is a cumulative technique in which you are making and assessing small progress each day.

It’s the 5 minutes per morning rule: put your alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each morning. If you do this for a week, you’ll have 35  minutes of free time. It’s important to assess the effects each morning, in order to see how much you can push. I know people who are able to push 5 minutes per morning for two weeks continuously. That gives them an extra 10 minutes aside the expected extra hour. Other seem to do it better in installments: 5 minutes for a week, than one week at the same hour. And then another week with the alarm clock 5 minutes earlier each morning.

Gradual adaptation works. Period. I never met somebody who didn’t get results from that. This is why is so spread as opposed to the brute force technique. I successful used gradual adaptation when I learned a new language and I found it much more appropriate than brute force. For instance, when I was in Japan I tried the brute force approach in learning Kanji. The result was a lot of frustration. I was so confident that once there I will learn my way out in one or two days that I totally neglected to learn some Kanji before getting to Japan. Once there, I was completely puzzled and despite my efforts I had to rely only on English signs for my orientation.

Adequate

Waking up early works only if you have something to do with that hour. If you don’t, you’d be better sleeping more and hope you have some nice dreams. So, if you ever want to implement that habit, I highly suggest to give some meaning to that extra hour. Start a list of things that you have to do during that hour. And then do them.